By the mid- eighteenth century freemasonry existed in most western European countries.
1 Its cultural migration was a complex process, to this day only partially
understood. We will return to the chronology of the process and attempt to make
sense out of the Channel crossing that accompanied it, but only after we have
examined the tension that arose around the first Continental lodges. These were to
be found by the mid-1730s in towns and cities of northern and western Europe, in
that densely urban corridor from Amsterdam to Paris. With the lodges came the
anonymous literary exposures, offering rituals and myths, not least, as we have
seen, claiming Cromwell's association with the fraternity (see pp. 27-28). In this
chapter we examine not the myths, but the realities, the actual beliefs of some of the
earliest lodges, and, just as important, the official and unofficial responses to them
in various European countries.

In the first instance the lodges on the Continent represented the foreign and the
unknown. They also embodied British cultural values associated with the potentially
subversive: religious toleration, relaxed fraternizing among men of mixed, and
widely disparate, social backgrounds, an ideology of work and merit, and, not least,
government by constitutions and elections. By the 1730s all these values were the
prized ideals of an international cultural movement that laid claim to the secular and
the modern, that came to be called the Enlightenment. And if that association were
not enough, the lodges called attention to themselves by their secrecy.

The tension freemasonry aroused infected civil magistrates as well as clergy. In Paris lodge meetings were raided by the police (p. 27); in Portugal a freemason, John Coustos, a member of a London lodge, was arrested and tortured in 1743. The
authorities claimed that he and his brothers had been publicly rowdy in violation of
the Lenten season. The papal condemnation had been in 1738. In the 1740s freemasonry was regarded with suspicion in Austrian territories.
2 Their pious queen, Maria

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